(Re)conceptualizing environmentalism in the global south: Lessons from India

This paper examines three popular water struggles in India and proposes that a new approach is needed to understand environmentalism in the Global South. Most scholarship on environmental movements in underdeveloped countries characterizes them as struggles led by marginalized local actors and suggests that protesters’ participate in movements to defend their access to necessary resources. While this livelihood approach is useful, it ignores or trivializes the heterogeneous nature of participants, the meanings and cultural significance of resources, importance of broad-based coalitions, and influence of transnational discourses on movements. As a result, analyses are often one dimensional and provide a limited view of struggles. I move beyond the livelihood approach also known as “environmentalism of the poor” (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997, Martinez-Alier 2002), and carry out a holistic assessment of the three water movements.

The water struggles all started between 2002 and 2005 as responses to the World Bank and Indian government’s development strategy of foreign investment in public utilities (water) and private industry (the Coca-Cola Corporation). An in-depth analysis of the water conflicts in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Plachimada reveals the need to recognize the existence of a variety of environmentalisms in the Global South. This approach encourages researchers to consider the different actors, sites, interests, knowledge, values, and meanings within environmental conflicts. The paper, therefore, exposes numerous dimensions of movements including their livelihood, lifestyle, cultural, epistemic, and global struggles. This research is based on ethnographic evidence from eight months of field work in India and 105 in-depth interviews.